Captain Mahan, who was far from being a small man, admitted that his information on Japanese ordnance might have been faulty. Sims became known, in British and American circles, as one of the men who’d guessed ahead of the Admiralty on the Dreadnaught. The British civil lord asked permission to have Lieutenant Commander Sims’ report published in Blackwood’s Magazine.
Sims, who had a way of chumming up to his English friends whenever anything new was in the works, managed to turn up in England. In spite of the fact that the Admiralty was wrapping the Dreadnaught in portentous secrecy, Sims got himself smuggled on board in civilian clothes and was shown every detail of construction and ordnance. When he came home President Roosevelt appointed him his naval aide.
Meanwhile at fortyseven Sims married a young lady whom he’d met years before on his diplomatic tour of duty in Europe, when her father was minister to St. Petersburg, and followed his friend T.R.’s example by rapidly producing a large family: three pretty little girls and two handsome boys. Whenever he wasn’t at sea the commander devoted himself to their upbringing.
One of T.R.’s last acts, before so reluctantly handing the presidency over to William Howard Taft, was to see that Sims was given command of a battleship. A skillful and popular commander, his ship became known as the “cheer-up ship.”
In the course of his duty on the Minnesota the Atlantic fleet made a fraternal visit to England. Officers and enlistedmen were entertained at Guildhall by the Lord Mayor of London. The officers sat on a dais and drank champagne while the men drank beer at deal tables in the body of the hall.
The luncheon culminated in toasts and speeches extolling the kinship between the two great branches of the Anglo-Saxon race. Full of the spirit of the occasion, Commander Sims sent his cap sailing into the middle of his crew and called for a cheer that would raise the roof off old Guildhall. Then, in his speech of thanks to the Lord Mayor and City of London for the entertainment, he declared that if ever the integrity of the British Empire should be seriously threatened, the English could count on the assistance of every man, every ship, every dollar and every drop of blood of their kinsmen aross the sea.
Commander Sims’ speech, received in England as no more than was due, raised a storm in the American press. The German language papers roared. President Taft was besieged with demands that Sims should be courtmartialed. Enemies in the Navy Department were out for his hide. The President agreed with his Secretary of the Navy that Sims was too valuable an officer to cashier. He let him off with a public reprimand.
When his tour of duty on the battleship came to an end Commander Sims was relegated to the academic calm of the Naval War College at Newport.
Newport gave him leisure to study and think on naval tactics. He became passionate for destroyers. Leaving Newport with the rank of captain he was put in charge of the Atlantic destroyer flotilla. With the outbreak of war in Europe the words of his Guildhall speech were beginning to seem more and more prophetic. Sims threw himself into the practical management of destroyers under combat conditions at sea. As usual he was idolized by his command. The flotilla became “Sims’ Flotilla.”
In January 1917 Sims went back to the War College as president with the rank of rear admiral. In spite of Josephus Daniels’ conviction that he was too pro-British, when war became imminent, the controversial Admiral Sims was the obvious man to represent the United States with the Board of the Admiralty in London. His orders were merely to find out what was going on and to report.
Sims arrived in England three days after Congress declared war. He had his first taste of the noisy side of the business when the New York ran into a floating mine in the Mersey and was considerably damaged.
The passengers were taken off by an excursionboat full of drunken vacationers from the Isle of Man. The Britishers weren’t letting the war interfere with the Easter Bank Holiday.
A flag officer met Sims at the dock and hurried him to London by special train. He was immediately taken to the Admiralty to see his old friend John Jellicoe, now a full admiral and, as first Sea Lord on the Board of the Admiralty, in direct charge of naval operations. With hardly a word Jellicoe handed him a paper with the actual figures of the sinkings by submarine. Sims, who’d been reading the newspapers, was, as he put it, “fairly astounded.”
“It looks,” he said, “as if the Germans were winning the war.”
“They will win, unless we can stop those losses,” said Jellicoe.
Sims spent the next few days rooting the facts out from reluctant officials. At the beginning of the war the Allies could dispose of twentyone million tons of shipping, six million tons more than was considered absolutely essential for the supply of the British Isles and the armies in the field. Up to February of 1917 shipbuilding had been not quite keeping up with losses. Now in February and March onethird of the margin of safety had been wiped out. If sinkings kept up at the present rate, by October there would be less tonnage available than was necessary to carry on the war.
It was generally agreed that the best weapon against the submarine was the fast torpedoboat destroyer. Ever since the Japanese sneak attack by destroyers on the Russian fleet in Port Arthur the innovators in the Royal and the United States navies had been begging for more destroyers.
Against submarines, destroyers were almost the perfect weapon. Their speed and shallow draft made them almost immune to torpedoes. The destroyers’ torpedoes could be more quickly aimed and had longer range than those on the submarines. If the submarine was caught on the surface the destroyer could ram it with its sharp heavily reinforced bow. Even the oldest types had great firepower.
The development by the Royal Navy of effective depth charges greatly added to the destroyers’ efficiency against submarines. These ashcans, as they were called, were mines set to be exploded by the pressure of the water at any desired depth. They could be dropped over the destroyer’s stern. Within a radius of a hundred feet they were usually fatal, but even when they exploded at much greater distance they could damage fragile machinery or at least give the submarine crew a shaking up they never forgot.
When Sims asked the Britishers why more destroyers couldn’t be detailed to protect merchant shipping they explained patiently that there just weren’t enough destroyers. Their antisubmarine patrol was pieced out with converted yachts, trawlers, drifters, tugs, anything that could keep afloat long enough to drop an ashcan when a U-boat was sighted or suspected.
The Grand Fleet at Scapa Flow had first priority for destroyer protection. Then came hospital ships. Sims learned of the ingenious devilment that lay behind the German announcement that they would sink hospital ships. The Germans knew that the British would not face abandoning sick and wounded men to drown. Destroyers needed to protect valuable cargoes had to be detailed to the hospital ships. The third priority went to the Channel crossings where by continuous patrol an immune zone had been created where no submarine dared venture. Fourth was the lifeline to India through the Mediterranean.
Well, the American asked, if convoys worked in the Channel, why wouldn’t they work in the Irish Sea, and on the Atlantic approaches? Just weren’t enough destroyers, the Britishers repeated. In spite of a speededup building program there were only ten or fifteen destroyers left to protect the merchantmen that brought in the food, the petroleum products, the rubber and the munitions on which Great Britain’s survival depended.